Nectar of the Gods
by BookofNorth
Summary: this is what happens when someone casually mentions Greek Mythology, drinking, and Billy Joel to me...    ...I'm assuming mythology is public domain enough, but just in case: I don't own it...yeah


It was five-o'-clock on a Saturday, and the usual crowd had shuffled in.

Poseidon, as usual, had bellied up to the bar early, and was currently introducing himself to the bottom of his sixth Atlantean Suckerpunch, and was considering going for a water polo team of the little guys. Zeus was in the corner booth, making overtures to a trio of forest nymphs while trying to hide the ring Hera had recently super-glued to his finger. Hermes had set up a game of Three-Card Monte at another table, and Eros was losing badly.

Poseidon sighed, and called over the barman for another drink. Everything was so normal, so bloody normal it made his teeth hurt.  
Dionysus noticed something was wrong as he set the drink down, and asked "everything okay Uncle Po?"  
The god of the seas considered this question. No, he thought, no everything was definitely -not- okay. Quite the opposite. It was -so- very not okay that he had even considered coming to this run-down, dirty, sketchy bar in the first place.

"No" he said.

Dionysus pulled up the little stool he had behind the bar and plunked down in front of his uncle. "You wanna talk about it?"  
Poseidon studied the little glass his drink had come in, and the small pyramid of little glasses he had accrued over the course of the evening. This was the question he had been afraid would come, that he had spent hours agonizing over an appropriate response to, a question he had resolved he would not give a truthful answer to. Although what he said was not at all what he had rehearsed.

"Amphitrite and I had a fight." the fact that he could say this with unslurred enunciation told Poseidon he hadn't drunk enough yet. He ordered another, then said "she wants a divorce."

Dionysus set the drink in front of him, then poured himself one. "That's rough."

A scuffle erupted at the door, as Hephaestus furiously came looking for his wife Aphrodite, who had just casually slipped out the bathroom window into the back seat of Ares' convertible. Dionysus ran to go sort it out, leaving Poseidon alone with his troubles, and a drink potent enough to peel the paint off a city.

"You think you've got problems?" asked a dark and troubled voice from further down the bar. Poseidon struggled to focus on something that far away, then suddenly realized he knew the voice.

"Hades? Is that..." he paused for a moment to appreciate how well his grip on sober reality was finally beginning to slip, "...you?"

The keeper of the Underworld knocked back his Apocalyptic Sunrise and lime, and belched in a most un-Hades-like fashion before saying "of course it's me you dolt..." the effort of saying this seemed to knock the Ruler of the Dead a bit loopy for a second, before regaining control of his sarcasm and saying "your crustacean of a wife finally...finally -dump- you then?"

Poseidon held up one unstable yet accusatory finger and said "don't you dare...*hic*...don't make fun a' my wife."  
the most brilliantly clever insult Poseidon had ever come up with briefly arrived in his brain, though when it saw how much alcohol it would have to room with there, it promptly took off screaming in the opposite direction, leaving behind: "at leasht I didn' have to kidnap mine."

There was a fecund silence, during which Athena walked by, reading a book, nursing a tonic water, rejecting the increasingly-desperate advances of an inebriated Apollo, and questioning her decision to go out at all that night at the same time.

Hades opened and shut his mouth like a dying fish, before snapping "well at leasht mine's not a fish"  
Poseidon parried and riposted with "well at leasht mine doeshn't live in a cave"

Hades barely deflected this one and made one last desperate thrust with "well at leasht mine..."

He lost track of the last word on that thought, and it refused to come back. Instead, he simply waggled a finger as though he -had- finished the most devastating and brilliant insult anyone had ever heard, and returned to his drink.

"Oh come on fellas," said the voice universally used by frat men and sports fans to address people not having fun in a desperate attempt to make them see reason, "lighten up."

Both Poseidon and Hades turned to come faces-to-face with their younger brother, Zeus, now with a throbbing red mark across his face rather like three hands would make when slapping someone for being aggressively inappropriate, or inappropriately aggressive.  
Hades used a very rude word, and tried to drown himself in his drink, only to find that he had drunk all of it already.

Zeus laughed obnoxiously and clapped them both on the back. "Come on guys, you two are the only ones not having fun"  
Poseidon looked over his shoulder at the chaos that, appropriately, erupted just as Zeus finished talking. Apollo took a faceful of pepper spray from Athena, Hermes' goons were beating Eros senseless in the alley behind the bar for not giving them the money, Dionysus was cleaning up the mess a group of satyrs had made of tables four through six, and Artemis had just showed up with all of her dogs.

Feeling very sober, and very stupid, Poseidon shared a glance with Hades, then paid his bill and scuttled back home, making a mental pinky-promise with himself to never go anywhere he might run into his family again.


End file.
